Roads, reflections and ruminations

 

Roads: Driving America's Greatest Highways

by Larry McMurtry

I did not realize this was the author of Lonesome Dove when I picked it up. It appears he's done a great deal of travel, crisscrossing the U.S. many times on many roads. Each chapter of this small book describes one of his travels over a lifetime of wandering. But before I get to the travels, let me quote this:

I once met a well-known writer in an airport; he recognized me and immediately struck up a conversation about his favorite subject, himself. Though a jerk, an asshole, and a bore, he was, and he continued to be, an excellent writer; but from then on, I avoided reviewing him. I couldn't forgive the books what I knew about their author.

This is not what the book is about, but I read it and agreed instantly. I had a similar experience--an author I used to love and would define as one of my favorites, who seemed to sour in his old age. He became so persnickety and anti-social that I could hardly finish one of his later books; then when I read a biography of him, I knew too much. I don't think I'll ever want to re-reread any of his books I used to enjoy.

But, back to the point of this book, which I definitely do want to reread.

Looking back on my twenty years in the capital I now realized that [...] there was a more basic need that kept forcing me to drive away: the small eastern sky. Washington has sky, of course, but it doesn't have nearly enough to still my yearning for the plains. [...]there were many times when, Huck Finn-like, I simply lit out for the territory, to the place where the sky swelled out.

Toward the end of the book he has some interesting observations on why we drive. For me, they'd apply equally to why I walk or why I jog:

Being alone in a car is to be protected for a time from the pressures of day-to-day life; it's like being in one's own time machine, in which the mind can rove ahead to the future or scan the past. When I'm about to start a novel I've always found that driving across the country for a few hundred miles is a good way to get ready. I may not be forming scenes or thinking about characters--indeed, may not be thinking of much of anything on these drives. but I'm getting ready, all the same.

There aren't a lot of strict descriptions in this book, and I kind of missed that. The one part that made me pull out my to-go list was his description of Highway 2, across the top of the country, from Michigan to a point near the continent's edge. Most of his descriptions are colored by memory, circumstance, or the thoughts running through his heat at the time. But that's okay.

Thirty miles west of Albuquerque the 40 seems to rise into air, and it seems fitting that it should do this, for the sky here is so vast that it could subsume all things.